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The End of the Solo Blog? What to Do About It

The year is 2013. Today, starting a blog that anyone cares about is more challenging than ever and the competition ferocious. In many instances there could be literally thousands of blogs publishing content about the same topic as you. Often, these bloggers are already invested years of their lives publishing quality content and networking with other thought-leaders in the space.

Considering the competitive landscape almost every new blogger will enter in 2013, is it too hard to start a blog right now? Have young upstart bloggers missed out on their chance for blogging fame and fortune?

No, all is not lost young bloggers. I don’t believe that you have entered the fray too late. With that being said, you will need an awareness that the eco-system in which you’re about to enter is much different than the one you would have discovered just five or so years ago. One major change is that we are reaching the end of the solo professional blogger. If you’re goal is to write as a hobby then feel free to continue working alone. But if you plan to build a blog as a business, you’ll need to build a team.

The End of the Solo Blog?

When I refer to a solo blog, I’m talking about a blog that’s created, written, and promoted by a single individual. Due to the growing competitiveness of the web, solo blogging for business will become almost impossible to pull-off moving forward. There’s simply too much for one person to do.

The modern blogger is expected to know how-to accomplish each of the following to have a chance of building a successful blog:

Create a Blog: Install Wordpress, setup the domain, have an attractive blog design.

Email Marketing: You’ve also got to learn how to build an email list and learn the basics of email marketing.

Social Media: Bare minimum, bloggers need a presence in the big three social media venues like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

SEO: You’ve got to learn how to best optimize your blog posts so that they capture new visitors to your blog via search engines.

Oh yeah! Did I mention you’ve still got to write regular content to publish on your blog as well? The steps outlined above could easily be a full-time job for any one person. If you’ve got a full-time gig that pays the bills right now, you’re going to have tough time learning and completing each of these steps without a little help.

How to Adapt in 2013

To effectively stand out in 2013, you can’t do it alone any longer. There’s just too many areas of marketing you need to become an expert in and complete everything yourself. To adapt to the competitiveness of the blogosphere, you’ll need to work as part of a team moving forward. Here are a few things I and other bloggers are doing to build their blogging teams for the future.

Get technical help: If building and designing websites isn’t your primary skill set, I highly encourage you to outsource the work to someone else. Trust me. If you only outsource your blog setup, plug-in installation, design, and other technical aspects of blog building, it can free up weeks of your time that would be invested trying to figure out why your header doesn’t look right.

Where to Build Your Design Team? Websites like Elance.com make it easy to hire an experienced web designer for small projects like building a blog or creating a logo. Often you can get a professional looking blog setup for under $200.

Build a Marketing Alliance: I recently built my first marketing alliance with a fellow blogger closely related to my industry. Our specific alliance? We both do a lot of guest posting on high-quality blogs. When it makes sense, we reference each other’s websites in these posts when it is beneficial to the article being submitted. Over time, we both get exposure across a lot more websites than we could complete on our own.

Where to Build Your Marketing Alliance? My blogging alliance partner was guest posting on a lot of the same websites I contributed content to. I visited his blog and could immediately tell this guy was very serious about blogging. I sent him an email letting him know I liked his stuff and pitched an alliance via email. He accepted and we’ve been working together for the past three months.

Get Content Development Help: Joseph O. from GuestBloggingTactics.com has built a writing team of four different authors to help develop on-going high-quality content for his blog. This team ensures that on-going content is always being published for his website.

Where to Build a Writing Staff: Finding a dedicated staff of writers can be difficult, although not impossible. If you can’t pay for writers right now, consider teaming up with other active bloggers you meet on social media or make a request for JV partners on forums.

If you plan to build a new blog in 2013, don’t worry it’s not too late to start now. Just be aware of the changes that have occurred over the last few years and build a team to make the work associated with running a successful blog more manageable.